JPMorgan: Financial Winners and Losers

(Updated with final stock price moves throughout.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- JPMorgan Chase (JPM) was among the winners of the financial sector Thursday after an analyst hiked his stock price target for the bank by 45% to reflect a new method of valuing bank stocks.

JPMorgan shares finished up 31 cents, or 0.7%, at $44.96 after Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove upped his price target to $58 from $40, reiterating his buy on the bank's stock. Bove said the increased price target reflects valuing bank stocks on pretax, pre-provision earnings, which he says is more appropriate as it "captures the potential rise in earnings in an expanding economy."

"Since not all of pretax, provision earnings will show up as reported earnings, a multiple of 7 on these projections may be appropriate. This would value J.P. Morgan at $58 per share," Bove wrote in a research note. "Thus, even though the near-term fundamentals of this company have not improved its earnings are now being valued at much higher rates."

Citigroup (C) was also the subject of a separate research note by Bove. He raised his stock price target for the bank to $5 from $4, citing comments by Citi CEO Vikram Pandit that dispelled some of the recent news articles suggesting that the bank would sell as many as 9 billion shares in the next few months.

On Tuesday, news reports surfaced that Citigroup was working on a plan to reduce the U.S. government's 34% stake, which included a possible multibillion-dollar stock sale. Later in the day, Citigroup raised $5 billion in debt guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, or TLGP, through the sale of bonds with two and three-year maturities, according to reports.